Bike lame / The Brompton bicycle has had its day |
Anyone who has had the misfortune to be in central London at rush hour will be familiar with an unlovely spectacle: that of a middle-aged man solemnly making a fool out of himself on an ungainly-looking bicycle that seems slightly too small for him. This mode of transportation is none other than the Brompton bicycle, once a status symbol for any upwardly mobile professional but now, increasingly and unsurprisingly, regarded as an object of ridicule. The recent news that the company’s sales are declining, for the third year in a row, will come as a surprise to few; it is more of a shock to realise that this strange, overpriced contraption has lasted for fifty years.
Cycling has always been a Marmite pursuit: for everyone who swears by it, there is someone else who swears at its practitioners
If the absolute apotheosis of the Brompton bicycle user was Hugh Bonneville’s well-meaning but hapless character Ian Fletcher in the BBC comedy W1A, trying and........